Inside Cyberpunk 2077's disastrous rollout

Adam Badowski, the studio head of CDPR, responded to Schreier's article and follow up tweets:
https://twitter.com/AdamBadowski/status/1350532507469553668

I’ve read your piece and tweets, thank you for the read. I have some thoughts.

Fans and journalists were wowed by Cyberpunk 2077’s ambition and scale. What they didn’t know was that the demo was almost entirely fake.

It's hard for a trade show game demo not to be a test of vision or vertical slice two years before the game ships, but that doesn't mean it's fake," Badowski wrote. "Compare the demo with the game. Look at the Dumdum scene or car chase, or the many other things. What the people reading your article may not know is that games are not made in a linear fashion and start looking like the final product only a few months before launch. If you look at that demo now, it's different yes, but that's what the 'work in progress' watermark is for. Our final game looks and plays way better than what that demo ever was.

As for 'missing' features, that's part of the creation process. Features come and go as we see if they work or not. Also, car ambushes exist in the final game almost verbatim to what we showed in the demo.

And if we get a bit more granular about our release, the vision we presented in this demo evolved into something that got multiple 9/10s and 10/10s on PC from many renown gaming outlets in the world.

As for the old-gen consoles, yes that is another case, but we've owned up to that and are working super hard to eliminate bugs (on PC, too - we know that's not a perfect version either) and we are proud of Cyberpunk 2077 as a game and artistic vision. This all is not what I'd call disastrous.

Most of the staff knew and openly said it wouldn't be ready for release in 2020

You've talked with 20 people, some being ex employees, only 1 of whom is not anonymous," Badowski said. "I wouldn't call that 'most' of the over 500-people staff openly said what you claim.

A few non-Polish staffers shared stories about coworkers using Polish in front of them, which violated company rules. Made them feel ostracized, they said... were their coworkers talking shit about them?

Everyone here speaks English during meetings, every company-wide email and announcement is in English - all that is mandatory," Badowski explained. "Rule of thumb is to switch to English when there's a person not speaking a given language in a casual conversation.

It is, however, pretty normal for Germans speaking German, Poles speaking Polish, Spaniards speaking Spanish etc. (there are 44 nationalities at the studio, you get the point) when there's no one else around. We are working in a multicultural environment.

If the question is if it's hard to move to another country, sometimes culture, and work and live there, then the answer is yes. But that's universal to every company all over the world, and we're doing what we can to ease that transition.

To which Schreier replied:
https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1350533897109516289

(CD Projekt chose not to respond to specific questions or make Badowski available for an interview for our article, so it's interesting to see these comments arriving now)

I do regret bringing up the language issue, since it's gotten a disproportionate amount of attention and is not a particularly big deal.

Worth noting, however, what Badowski doesn't address: the brutal crunch and the unrealistic timeline. I'd be happy to interview him any time